This provides a good summary of legibility research
relevant to the design of children’s books; it has a good bibliography of
articles on legibility research.

Lund, O. (1999), Knowledge construction in typography:
the case of legibility research and the legibility of sans serif typefaces. Unpublished
PhD thesis, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, The
University of Reading.

This PhD thesis provides a more detailed summary of
some of the material referred to in Watts and Nisbet (above). Its focus on sans
serif types means that it provides a comprehensive bibliography in this area,
though not all material covered is relevant to children’s books.

Zachrisson carried out a number of studies with
school-age children that looked at various aspects of typography. Some of his
studies are similar to those being carried out in the Typographic Design for
Children Project.

Rosemary Sassoon’s typeface ‘Sassoon Primary’ (and its
variants) has had considerable impact within the field of educational
publishing. This article refers to some of the research undertaken by Sassoon
to show that Sassoon Primary is preferred by children in particular reading
conditions.

Heller, S. (1995), 'Type play for kids.', Eye,vol.5,
no. 19, pp.44-53

This short article reminds us that designing for
children can be fun. It has many examples of inspired designing for children.

This book and article look particularly at problems in
designing bilingual texts for children. They are concerned with texts that
combine English with non-Latin scripts, such as Urdu, Panjabi, Bengali and
Gujarati.

History

There is no comprehensive historical survey of
typographic practice in children’s readers. Ian Michael’s The teaching of
English - from the sixteenth century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press) is essential contextual reading, and it provides a
comprehensive bibliography. R.L. Venezky ‘The history of reading research’. In
D. Pearson, R. Barr, M.L. Kamil and P. Mosenthal, Handbook of Reading
Research, 1, London:Longman, pp. 3-38, provides a good overview of work
that has contributed to research about reading.

The following are helpful in getting a picture of some
of the material being produced in the nineteenth and early part of the
twentieth centuries: